> And here is a recent climate paper by Gergis which was retracted after the blogosphere found flaws while attempting to replicate their work: > http://climatea

> And here is a recent climate paper by Gergis which was retracted after the blogosphere found flaws while attempting to replicate their work: > http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/10/more-on-screening-in-gerg.. http://climateaudit.org/2012/06/10/more-on-screening-in-gerg.... The link is to a website that clearly has the agenda of "anti-climate-crisis" and is run by a guy named Steve McIntyre, who, surprise surprise, appears to be from the mining and minerals exploration business, either as a finance guy or lawyer or both, per his own words here: "Previously, I spent about 35 years in the mining and mineral exploration business. During the last 20 years of this, I worked in the micro-cap exploration business and have a great deal of practical experience in dealing with prospectus and securities issues from the company point of view. Concepts like audit trails, due diligence and full, true and plain disclosure become second nature when you work in such an environment. ............ For McIntyre, undertaking this project has required an unpaid leave of absence from his career in mineral exploration financing, at the cost of over a year’s foregone earnings so far." ............. Wikipedia: "Stephen McIntyre is a Canadian mathematician, former minerals prospector, and semi-retired mining consultant (...) In 2011 he became Chairman of the Board of Trelawney Mining and Exploration Inc." Thus, probably a shill, and/or somebody with a financial incentive to hold his views, combined with a lack of relevant expertise. Bad combo. And unlikely to be trustable or objective. I'll stick with the views of the vast majority of climate scientists, thank you very much. However imperfect and human they may be. > Perhaps we should see whether this too holds up to scrutiny for a few years before remaking the $100T world economy. That line is not a strong argument, in my judgement, particularly the last 5 words. To get real specific, if the implication is that: (1) the total economy is $100T therefore we can't possibly change anything ... then, that argument is invalidated by the case that if we DON'T do anything, we may hurt or shrink that economy even more/worse than if we do take steps to address climate change. "We can't possibly make an incision in your skin, that could cause bleeding! Uh, there's a bullet lodged in your lung, you'll be much worse off if we DON'T remove it." (2) a $100T world economy means if we were to add say a 10% overhead cost to the production of all those goods services, the economy would somehow collapse and disappear, with millions or billions laid off, dogs and cats living together, oh my! No, that's not how it would work. First off, costs always get passed on. If people still needed a given thing, they'd still get it. Maybe they get less of one thing and more of another. And any money spent to reduce pollution or recapture carbon, etc. is money STILL spent on goods & services, on jobs, etc., so it still goes into people's hands, to in turn be spent again on other things. It might be the case that the billionaires and multi-millionaires who make profits from the existing state of the fossil fuel industry might make less profits -- or, they might make the same, if they shifted what they produce or reduced costs in other ways. For example, perhaps the oil & coal industry becomes less profitable. But the solar & wind industries grow and become more profitable. On the net, on the whole, big picture, that could be break even or even overall much better for the world economy. And there's no technical reason why someone like, say, a Koch, who gets a large amount of his current wealth from the oil industry, couldn't also invest in renewables, or in climate change mitigation technologies, and end up just shifting his profit sources over to that. The filthy rich can stay filthy rich. The blue collar guy driving trucks or doing trainable equipment maintenance in the natural gas industry can instead do it in the solar/wind/tidal/geothermal industry, etc. (3) remaking the $100T world economy is bad. Changes to our routines are bad! We shouldn't do that. ..... This is an invalid argument because the world economy is already changing. It's always in a constant state of continual change, anyway. Period. If anything, it's clearly not in a steady state, it's very chaotic, and the total nominal dollar size of the world economy just keeps growing and growing each year, seemingly without bound, just as the human population is growing. So it's already in a state of constant change, it's (roughly) growing without bound, and it already experiences retractions and booms and shocks. The climate science argument is, we might need to make certain changes in certain parts of our economy (not everything, just a subset of it), in order to prevent these other undesired things from happening, which could have a much bigger negative effect financially, and non-financially (quality of life terms, etc.) (4) remaking $100T world economy is bad, we shouldn't remake it! Again invalid because the climate change case is not to completely remake it. It wouldn't need to change 100% into something radically different. Just change enough to (a) take us off a collision course, and (b) ideally shift the total human impact on the climate & ecosystems into something sustainable and balanced. It could be a gradual partial change. But the longer we wait, the bigger the changes might have to be, all at once, and that's our fault and the fault of the folks who keep fighting it or dragging their heels. Never exercise and then ignore those weird sensations in your chest and suddenly one day you'll be making a radical change to your own personal economy in the form of a hospital emergency trip. Not picking on your personally, just this line of argument which I've seen made many times before on this issue.